Hello World

I'm proud, nervous, and a little surprised that adamsimpson.net is finally live! It has been a long time in the making, and I'm relieved to have it up. Now the fun begins.

A Little About Me

To sum me up, I'll bust out the 'ol bullet points.

• I work for a small web shop, based in Pennsylvania (though I live in Ohio) and do anything from front-end development and design to "social media" and copy-writing.
• I am twenty-five years old and married to the greatest gal there is.
• I graduated from college with a degree in English Lit (the web is made of words, so this works, right? right?).
• I love: the interwebs, design, development, David Foster Wallace, C.S. Lewis, Don DeLillo, and Jimmy Eat World.
• I dislike: most vegetables, Windows (not the ones in buildings), Jane Austen, bad drivers, and when the blinds in our apartment are open at night, it just skeeves me out.

About This Site

Still here uh? Brave. Very brave. You have leveled up +1 in patience.

Anyway, my vision for this site is a place where I can share the things I'm learning as I do my job, so lots of nerdy posts about front-end development stuff, design stuff, and writing stuff. I'll probably also throw in observations on the latest tech gadgetry. I may also do more general posts regarding general creative work or whatever else strikes my fancy.

Technical Bits

This site is powered by Jekyll, a static-site generator. Jekyll is fantastic for a number of reasons, but I love it because I give it text files, and it gives me my site.

I've modified my Jekyll install a bit. I added Steven Romej's permalink changes to stop Jekyll from creating 'post-name-as-a-folder->index.html' to 'post-name-as-a-file.html'. I also adopted the pagination changes from Dane Harrigan's fork.

Jekyll is running on top of a Linode 512 running Unbuntu and Nginx. I added one line to my Nginx conf file to support better permalinks thanks to this great post. I just used the one line, try_files $uri.html $uri/ 404.html;.

My posting process is simple and straightforward, all I need is Dropbox and a text editor. Usually this means I am using iA Writer, which happily melds the two requirements (and works on my iPhone, iPad, or Mac). I simply write a post and save it in my posts folder in Dropbox. Dropbox takes care of syncing it to the Linode which has Dropbox and a shared copy of my site folder. When a new post is synced up, Jekyll builds my site with the new data and it's done, the post is live.

Now I owe Ted Kulp and Tyler Hall a beer for their posts that got me going with this Dropbox to Jekyll setup. I followed Mr. Kulp's idea and had incron fire a little bash script when a new post came in from Dropbox.

The other obvious benefit to having my site in Dropbox is that my site is automatically backed up.

Hardware

And now, the infamous, what-do-I-use-at-my-desk section.

Well, I currently use a 15" MacBook Pro circa 2009. I connect it to an old 20" Dell LCD at my desk, and also use a Apple Wireless Keyboard, and Magic Mouse.

I also have an iPhone 4, iPad 2, and a Kindle.

Overall, I'm happy with my current setup, though I do plan on picking up an SSD + 8GB of RAM in the near future.

Software

As I already mentioned, I use iA Writer to write this site, and also for any writing needs for work. I also use Simplenote & NValt for quick thoughts and to-do lists on the go.

I use Fireworks and Photoshop for any design related work. I use a combination of Transmit and Sublime Text 2 for my FTPing and coding needs. Terminal is usually open for Git, or server tomfoolery.

Finally, for my browsers I use Safari & Chrome Canary for browsing and development respectively.

The End

I hope this wall of text isn't too intimidating and that you learned a little bit about me and what makes this site tick. Just a word of warning, the look and feel of this site may change from time to time. I love to tinker, so consider it a constant work in progress. Thanks for reading.

Stick around and enjoy the ride with me!

-Adam